Canonical Partners with AMD for Ubuntu OpenStack Cloud Server

Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Ubuntu Linux distribution is ramping up its OpenStack efforts thanks to a new server solution from AMD.

The AMD SeaMicro SM15000 server platform is now being bundled with the Ubuntu 14.04 server edition to enable rapid OpenStack cloud deployments. Ubuntu 14.04 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release that first debuted in April of this year.

The full solution is available in a 10 RU bundle that includes three cloud controllers and 80 Gbps of I/O.

"AMD and Canonical have dedicated a tremendous amount of engineering resources to ensure an integrated solution that removes the complexity of an OpenStack technology deployment," said Dhiraj Mallick, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD data center server solutions, in a statement.

"The SM15000 server, Ubuntu LTS 14.04 and OpenStack is an amazing solution filling a need in the industry for an OpenStack solution that can be deployed easily without spending a fortune on professional services or hiring teams of people," Mallick continued.

AMD and Canonical Continue Their Collaboration

While AMD and Canonical are just now announcing the bundled solution, this isn't the first time the market has seen Ubuntu running on a SeaMicro server. In fact, at the OpenStack Atlanta Summit in May, Canonical had SeaMicro servers in its booth.

Additionally, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, in a keynote at the Atlanta event, spoke at length about his distribution's flavor of OpenStack running on SeaMicro.

In tests conducted prior to the Atlanta Summit, Shuttleworth noted that when using Ubuntu OpenStack on 576 AMD SeaMicro hosts, 168,000 virtual machines were able to be launched.

As part of the new Ubuntu solution, AMD has a reference architecture that can enable up to 57 Nova compute and three Cinder storage nodes.

The AMD SeaMicro solution isn't the only "cloud-in-a-box" platform for Canonical's Ubuntu Linux either. The Ubuntu Orange Box that was also first demonstrated at the OpenStack Atlanta Summit is a cloud box effort as well.